The Acquisition of Japanese as a Second Language (review)

As a major language of the world, Japanese has remained one of the commonly-studied foreign languages. It is perhaps also the most popular Asian language learned by English-speaking students. In light of this, Kanno’s edited volume on the acquisition of Japanese as a second language is a welcome addition to the English literature on this subject.

The volume comprises nine chapters. Ch. 1 gives an overview of the eight papers in this collection. They revolve around two major themes: applied issues in learning/evaluating Japanese as a second language and investigation of the L2 syntax of Japanese. The former includes Shunji Inagaki and Michael Long’s implicit negative feedback (Ch. 2), Noriko Iwashita’s tasks and learners’ output in nonnative-nonnative interaction (Ch. 3), and Junko Ford-Niwa and Noriko Kobayashi’s SPOT: a test measuring ‘control’ exercised by learners of Japanese (Ch. 4).

The rest of the chapters are devoted to the acquisition of certain features of Japanese grammar. Using Dutch-speaking subjects, Eric Kellerman, John van Izendoorn, and Hide Takashima’s ‘Retesting a universal: The empty category principle and learners of (pseudo)Japanese’ (Ch. 5), shows that the availability of the empty category principle to L2 learners of Japanese cannot yet be confirmed. Given possible interference from different L1s, contrastive approaches are taken in Makiko Hirakawa’s paper on L2 acquisition of Japanese unaccusative verbs by speakers of English and Chinese (Ch. 6) and Kazue Kanno’s on acquisition of verb gapping in Japanese by Mandarin and English speakers (Ch. 9). Similarly, comparison is made between L2 learners of Japanese and English in Naoko Yoshinaga’s ‘Who knows what and why? The acquisition of multiple wh-questions by adult learners of English and Japanese’ (Ch. 7) and William O’Grady’s ‘Gapping and coordination in second language acquisition’ (Ch. 8).

The three papers in Chs. 5–7, to varying extents, concern testing universal grammar often at the expense of the discourse function of constructions under examination. Yoshinaga seems to have overlooked that multiple wh-questions are typically used to request confirmation of new information just heard in speech. As such, their acceptability is more sensitive to contexts than to whatever government of trace of a wh-phrase. In treating There appeared a ship on the horizon as an instance of ‘surface unaccusativity’ in English, Hirakawa has been misled by the works she consulted. Such sentences are actually products of discourse strategies rather than syntactic rules. (The same also applies to her Mandarin examples of ‘surface unaccusativity’.) Note that no syntactic principle would explain the ungrammaticality of *There appeared the ship on the horizon. (Cf. Information status and noncanonical word order in English, Betty Birner and Gregory Ward, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998.)

Both O’Grady and Kanno mention in their papers that Mandarin prohibits verb gapping. While it is true that written Mandarin does not permit verb gapping (in contrast to written English), the language occasionally allows such gapping in very informal direct speech. For example, it is not impossible to say in Mandarin Ni zuo qiche, wo huoche ‘You take car (and) I train’.

In spite of the problems indicated above, this collection of papers certainly broadens our horizon of second language acquisition, especially that of Japanese.